Curiouser and Curiouser, cried Alice

One of the biggest questions is: How shall we live? That is a bit too big, so lets think about how we can use the arts to develop new, unexpected and valuable ideas about how the future could be, how we want it to be. Thats a bit more realistic. Lets imagine and create possible futures as a form of arts-based research combining utopias and dystopias. We have been constructing extensive physical environments and inviting the public to explore them, involving a wide range of audiences in exploring physical narratives with speculative content as a form of experiential futures. Curiouser and Curiouser, cried Alice (CCA) continues and deepens arts-based research into raising awareness and allowing contemplation of ways in which we can and want to live. We do this by collaboratively imagining and building possible and preferred futures, instigating as well as encouraging public discourse about individual and collective futures. We invite the public to investigate possible futures by walking through a built environment in order to experience and explore a prospective world. By creating immersive experiences, the public is encouraged to explore speculative cultures as well as possible, plausible, probable and preferable ways of being. We see museums to be places where not only understandings of the past and present are displayed and discussed, but also a place to explore understandings of possible futures and utopias to throw open the windows of the mind. Futures can be overwhelming. CCA will develop a series of public experiments and labs in order to investigate the ways in which possible and preferable futures can be experienced by the audience. We will create understandings and insights about ways to think out loud about futures, to enable and motivate informed action in the post-normal present. We try to make the future multiple, malleable and less daunting, able to be imagined and materialized, to help creating some enthusiasm for futures (Lust auf Zukunft) in times in which the fear of futures is predominant. The creation of plausible futures requires a balance between the positive and negative possible developments and trends. We want to explore not only possible, but more importantly preferable futures. Janus, the two-faced god of gateways and transitions, beginnings and endings, who is half the optimistic Pollyanna and half the doomsayer Cassandra, is perhaps the symbolic guide of this project. Janus keeps the optimistic and the pessimistic, the utopic and the dystopic in view and in balance, this tension opening us all to new creative ideas.

The research project Curiouser and Curiouser Cried Alice: Rebuilding Janus from Cassandra and Pollyanna (CCA) explored the questions of how we want to live in the emerging future, with the many crises and opportunities that are developing. This research leveraged interdisciplinary arts-based research approaches to explore future possibilities for society, communities and individuals. The CCA research team, consisting of Tina Auer, Tim Boykett and Alexandra Fruhstorfer, under the overview of PI Professor Anab Jain and the advisory board, developed insights into futuring, arts thinking approaches, new techniques for imaginations and co-creation as well as exhibitions, a series of public events, a symposium, papers and a book publication. Drawing on a wide field of expertise, the research group developed understandings of facilitation for group futuring and new ways to share imaginations of possible futures. They developed new techniques for co-creation in online and hybrid situations. Working with groups from academia, civil society, business and the arts, a wide range of co-creation processes were undertaken which led to inspiring understandings about possible futures and increases in futures literacy. These field experiments were used to explore and create new understandings of possible futures, enabling a general, non expert community to be involved in the active imagination of their own futures and those of their communities. The project has had a number of publications, including a piece in the Journal of Artistic Research, the premier publication for the arts research community. The main publication is the book Futures Brought to Life: We are no Futurists, which has received positive reviews from many in the arts, design and futuring communities. This book introduces an interested public to the processes of futuring and shares the concepts and techniques developed within CCA to new audiences. The symposium with the same title, Futures Brought to Life, was held at the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab in May 2022. The symposium was a meeting of many of the innovators in the field of experiential futures and the interplay of the futures, art and design fields. This meeting brought together many practitioners in the futuring field together with local experts and interested parties, deepening the networking of arts and futures practitioners to their mutual benefit. Ongoing collaborations and further developments have arisen with partners in Austria, Switzerland, Romania, Australia, Croatia and other countries. This project has enabled the research team to create and develop their arts-based research skills and foundations, raising the profile and importance of Austrian and European arts-based research in the process. The project has succeeded in having impact in the arts-based research, futures, civil society and academic fields, a transdisciplinary collaboration leading to new insights and new work.